Thursday, September 29, 2016

Viet Nam hopes to expand co-operation with Japan in three priority areas in information and communications technology (ICT) following a Viet Nam-Japan policy dialogue on ICT in Ha Noi on September 15.

The priority areas are identified as policies and a strategy for the development of 4G/5G networks after the digitalisation of television in Viet Nam, policies on protecting key information systems and the development of infrastructure for the internet of things.

At the dialogue, Deputy Minister of Information and Communications Phan Tam said Viet Nam and Japan became strategic partners in 2009 and bilateral co-operation in ICT has expanded since then.

The co-operation in priority areas could be in the form of expert training, the transfer of technology and technical solutions, he said, adding that the two ministries should coordinate to build mechanisms for regular information exchange.

Japan's Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Jiro Akama hoped the two sides would exchange information on policy on ICT and other interests.

The two ministries recently signed Memorandum of Understanding on co-operation in wireless radio frequency and postal service. —VNS

Friday, August 19, 2016

Research recently conducted by Oxford Economics says that the mobile internet sector may contribute US$5.1 billion to Viet Nam from 2015 to 2020, it was revealed at a workshop yesterday.

This amount was equivalent to 6.2 per cent of the country's gross domestic products (GDP) growth forecast.

According to the research, the sector is also expected to create roughly 145,600 new jobs for the country during the five-year period, or 3.2 per cent of the total employment growth estimate.

The mobile penetration ratio in Viet Nam will almost double to nearly 80 per cent by 2020 from what it was at the end of 2015, which is expected to match the forecast subscription rate for the entire Southeast Asia (SEA) region.

Those figures would be a great improvement for the sector in Viet Nam in comparison to 2010-2015.

During this period, the sector created an output worth $3.7 billion for Viet Nam's total income - equal to 6.4 per cent of the country's total GDP in this period - and helped provide 137,000 new jobs for local people, the research said.

Active mobile subscription rate per every 100 habitants in Viet Nam during the previous five years doubled to nearly 40 per cent at the end of last year from the number in 2013 after growing adequately between 2010 and 2013.

There is a lot of room for development of the mobile internet business in Viet Nam as the country had not paid enough attention to improve the infrastructure and create good legal conditions for the businesses, Oliver Salmon, senior economist at Oxford Economics, a British economic advisory firm, said.

Mobile internet applications have become a transformative force in the economy, which allow people and businesses access to a wide range of information and a customer base, according to Oliver.

Mobile internet also helps people connect with each other and provides lifetime education for people via distant learning.

Mobile internet helps improve the function of the labour market, assist people in disadvantaged areas to approach the labour market and enables employees to work long distance.

Viet Nam has its own advantages that can create good conditions to develop the mobile internet business, according to the economist. For example, the country has a youthful population of over 90 million people and has remained above the average level among middle-income economies.

The country is also able to maintain a good annual growth rate of 6.5 per cent since 2000, and has performed consistent economic restructuring to reduce its dependence on agriculture, which the research shows.

Rapid growth of mobile internet industry will help add to the country's income and help the government spend more on social investments, such as raising local people's living conditions and improving public infrastructure.

The research also found that "Viet Nam represents a strong growth opportunity for mobile internet technology" and "the growth of the industry in the country seems to match with the development of the sector among SEA countries".

Rapid growth in subscription rate was found in the research, which illustrated that ASEAN's active mobile accounts took off from nearly 20 per cent for every 100 inhabitants in 2012 to roughly 50 per cent at the end of 2015. The rate is expected to climb above 80 per cent by the end of 2020.

Across ASEAN, mobile internet businesses are expected to generate $58 billion and one million new jobs for the region's GDP from 2015 to 2020 from $47.2 billion and 903,000 jobs during the previous five years. — VNS

Monday, July 25, 2016

A kiosk at the Vietnam ICT COMM 2016 in Ha Noi. The three-day exhibition of products and technology in Viet Nam's telecommunication, IT and communication sectors ends today. — Photo hanoimoi.com.vnHA NOI (Biz Hub) —The Vietnamese IT industry has seen rapid development from 2010 to 2015, bringing revenue of US$7.6 billion in 2010 to $49.5 billion in 2015, or seven times as much as 2010.

This information was released by Nguyen Thanh Tuyen of the Ministry of Information and Communications at a seminar on Smart Society — a part of the Vietnam ICT COMM 2016 which began in Ha Noi on Wednesday and will conclude today.

Tuyen said with total revenue of $49.5 billion, the information technology sector posted a growth rate of nearly 15 per cent against 2014. Particularly, in 2015, the ICT sector became the one making large contributions to the State budget with a tax collection of VND82.3 trillion ($3.68 billion) accounting for 10 per cent of the State budget collection.

Tuyen acknowledged that in 2015, IT continued to grow due to the recovery of local and export markets and IT outsourcing sector as well.

He noted that despite economic turmoil, the electronics sector continued its growth with estimated revenue of over $46 billion, posting a growth rate of 16 per cent.

Retail sales of electronic hardware devices remained stable despite slow sales in the segment of PCs and tables. The Vietnamese laptop market grew only 2.4 per cent in quantity and saw a modest growth in value against 2014.

Tuyen also attributed the decline in the software sector to the global economic turmoil between 2011 and 2015, while noting that in 2015, the domestic software industry posted revenue of $16 billion, growing 9 per cent.

As for the digital content sector, last year this sector saw stable growth posting a revenue of $1.5 billion or 10 per cent year-on-year, Tuyen said.

Revenue from online mobile games stood at $107 million or equivalent to VND2.4 trillion with the number of smartphones rising from 12.6 million users in 2014 to 13.3 million users in 2015. The country has 76 licensed enterprises, providing online mobile games services.

In addition, there are approximately 200 licensed social networking and Facebook users already reached 35 million, accounting for one-third of the population as of December, 2015.

Today, about 62 per cent of Internet users are engaged in online shopping. In 2015, a Vietnamese spent about $160 per year, bringing more than $4 billion in revenue. This figure was expected to reach $10 billion by 2020 with average spending of $350 per person per year. It is equivalent to 5 per cent of total retail sales in the country.

Nowadays, more than 20,000 businesses have their own websites, accounting for 45 per cent of businesses in the nation. About 18 per cent have mobile sales applications.

Viet Nam has targeted to become a strong ICT country by 2020 and to use technology to drive competiveness and national economic growth. And it has the ambition to be among the fastest growing ICT countries in the world ranked by International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

To achieve this target, ICT businesses have made the effort to develop ICT infrastructure and boost IT applications in daily life and economic development.

Pham Duc Nghiem from the Ministry of Science and Technology said the Government had offered a lot of support for ICT enterprises and conducted certain incentives. —VNS

Monday, June 20, 2016

Many companies have embarked on a digital transformation of their business in an effort to increase sales and support customers through online systems, apps and social media. IT organizations are encouraged to develop a “fast” or “second gear” mindset capable of operating at internet speed and being focused on a digital transformation. Carrying out this shift while simultaneously supporting legacy systems that cannot be changed as rapidly is a tall order for many IT organizations. In-house IT departments must either learn to reinvent themselves so they can adapt to the fast-paced evolution of technology or outsource these efforts to quickly gain the expertise needed. IT outsourcing, or more specifically, outsourcing the creation of innovative and dynamic software apps and systems, is a reliable way for companies to ramp up a development team for the required fast gear.

My previous article focused on outsourcing the slow speed of two-speed IT. The two-speed IT strategy is popular because it helps companies understand the difference between the traditional “slow” focus of IT, centered around maintaining internal business-critical systems, compared to the “fast” UX design and DevOps focus needed to create dynamic online and mobile, customer-facing apps.

The rapid growth in new technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile apps, big data analytics, and seemingly unlimited cloud storage and compute power has profoundly changed every industry. Companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google have aligned their technology and IT systems with their business goals. They limit the size of their software engineering teams to support efficient agile and Kanban methods of development. Product managers think about entire user experiences instead of single features. Leading internet companies rely on frequent testing, experiments with the user interface and collecting data about consumer behavior in their products to learn what works and what doesn’t, even at the risk of failure.

The building blocks of digital enterprise architecture
According to McKinsey & Company, a digital enterprise architecture needs to include several elements to facilitate digital transformation:

Two-speed IT architecture – as described here

Instant cross-channel deployment of functionality - using microservices for small features or functionality that are deployed in minutes or hours

Zero downtime – using test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) that enable the update of individual pieces of functionality without disrupting the entire system

Real-time data analytics - analytics that become an integral part of the app and not just a stand-alone process

Easy process configuration - business users are able to change features without custom coding

Automated scaling of IT platforms - scalability across redundant private and public-cloud environments to eliminate potential slowdowns and downtime

Secure architecture - cybersecurity as an integral part of the overall application

Outsourcing provides these elements and accelerates the transition to a two-speed model. The agile culture required to think of software as a product, created in a factory-like manner with continuous improvement is achieved much more easily in an outsourced software development shop that is an expert at product development, rather than building a “fast” IT team and culture in a historically “slow” IT organization.

What are the risks in outsourcing the faster portion of IT?

For most technology executives, the question is not whether to outsource but what to outsource. There are two popular models of software outsourcing for fast IT:

+ Team extension – your developers work together with the outsourced developers
+ Autonomous team – the outsourced team(s) do all the development and you provide a product owner(s)
In both cases, the outsourced team has a significant responsibility to perform and there is a risk they won’t rise to the occasion.

To start, there is a risk you will select the wrong IT outsourcing firm. For example, the company you hired for slow IT maintenance of your legacy systems is probably the wrong choice for fast IT. You also face internal risks, as well. You will need one or more knowledgeable product owners who will be in frequent contact with your outsourced teams, and you may have to watch for declining employee morale. Underperformance and passive/aggressive behavior are common with employees who think their jobs are at risk.

There are also many rewards you should expect to see when outsourcing:

+ Access to the latest technology – good software outsourcing companies keep up with the latest trends
+ Cost savings – IT outsourcing to some locations has a lower cost structure, even when factoring in travel
+ Expert developers – it’s difficult to hire great developers, but IT outsourcing firms are constantly recruiting in under fished markets for the specific qualifications and certifications needed by their clients. Good software outsourcing companies have a pipeline of qualified candidates available to them
+ Flexibility – even if you can hire developers, you have limited ability to ramp up and ramp down teams as your needs change

Summary

The two-speed IT architecture is a good model for enabling the digital transformation of your company’s business in an agile and dynamic manner, while also delivering the positive user experience expected by customers. Fast or slow, there is a role for IT outsourcing in any company that is serious about digital transformation. There are many great software outsourcing companies to choose from in several convenient global locations. It is important to select a partner for your fast-mode outsourcing that is an expert in the technologies, methodologies and best practices of UX design and DevOps that you need.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

HERE, K&G TECHNOLOGY COMES CEBIT HANOVER 2016ABOUT CEBIT - NEW PERSPECTIVES IN IT BUSINESSCeBIT offers unique benefits. Boasting an IT show and a conference programme for professionals, CeBIT defines the latest IT trends, presents talks by high-calibre speakers and forward-looking panel discussions, and showcases product innovations from all over the world. The CeBIT fair is the opportunity to launch new products, meet new buyers, learn about emerging trends and access the global ICT market. Take this chance, K&G Technology participates to this big event to promote our service to the world!

For more information about CeBIT 2016Go to: www.cebit.deMeet us at Hall 5, Stand D48 to explore more how K&G can be the new IT Outsourcing Destination! Date trade fair: 14 - 18. March 2016Venue trade fair: Hanover, GermanyRepresentative: Mr. Kenny KhoaWhatapp/ viber/call/ zalo: 0084989619019

Established in 1989, Archos has developed a variety of products, including digital audio players, portable video players, digital video recorders, and netbooks, in addition to personal digital assistants, and a tablet that uses Google Android and Microsoft Windows. It also makes smartphones and smart home devices.

Archos will launch its feature phone, smartphone and tablet in Viet Nam at a price ranging from VND590,000 (US$25) for a feature phone to VND6 million ($250) for its tablet and high-quality smartphone. — VNS